CVE-2026-128086
Description
A flaw was found in OpenTelemetry Go. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending HTTP requests containing densely populated baggage headers to an exposed endpoint. Because the baggage parser eagerly allocates memory objects for every metadata property within the header, processing these requests consumes disproportionate amounts of memory and incurs substantial garbage collection overhead. This excessive resource consumption can degrade application performance and lead to a Denial of Service (DoS).
Statement
This vulnerability is evaluated as having a Moderate impact because exploitation requires baggage context extraction to be active on exposed, unauthenticated endpoints, and the blast radius is limited to resource contention rather than process termination. In typical Red Hat deployments, telemetry propagators are not configured to process untrusted baggage headers by default. Even when an application exposes extraction handlers to untrusted traffic, the bounded input size prevents unbounded heap growth, resulting primarily in temporary memory allocation spikes and increased garbage collection overhead.
Mitigation
Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base, or stability.
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details
Info alert:Important note
CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).
The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 5.3 | N/A | 5.3 |
| Attack Vector | Network | N/A | Network |
| Attack Complexity | Low | N/A | Low |
| Privileges Required | None | N/A | None |
| User Interaction | None | N/A | None |
| Scope | Unchanged | N/A | Unchanged |
| Confidentiality | None | N/A | None |
| Integrity Impact | None | N/A | None |
| Availability Impact | Low | N/A | Low |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
cve.org: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Availability
Technical Impact: DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU); DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory); DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)
When allocating resources without limits, an attacker could prevent other systems, applications, or processes from accessing the same type of resource. It can be easy for an attacker to consume many resources by rapidly making many requests or causing larger resources to be used than is needed.
Frequently Asked Questions
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